Trumped by politics: Pedro Antonio de Cossío, the merchant who ruled New Spain

Abstract

The Anglo-Spanish war of 1779–1783 within the context of the American Revolution challenged New Spain more intensely than previous imperial wars. As never before, the Spanish Crown pressured its wealthiest viceroyalty to financially support the war effort. The rule of interim viceroy Martín de Mayorga coincides with those critical years, but another figure, Pedro Antonio de Cossío, was the person in charge of controlling New Spain’s finances. Cossío’s brief tenure as superintendente de real hacienda (superintendent of the royal treasury) was anomalous in many senses and, for that reason, historians have misunderstood it. First, the Crown justified his tenure as a war emergency measure, but his appointment was a direct assault on the viceregal office as it dispossessed the incumbent viceroy from all his administrative economic powers. Cossío effectively displaced Mayorga as the main decision maker in the viceroyalty. Second, his position was secret, known only to four persons, including Cossío. To mask his covert office, the Crown appointed him publicly to the posts of intendente del ejército (army intendant) and secretary to the viceroy. Third, in addition to being an experienced royal official, Cossío was a rich transatlantic merchant. His contemporaries observed how a businessman now had equal or more power than the viceroy and began to denounce him as a corrupt despot. The perceived erasure of a line between the public and the private at such a high level of government led to Cossío’s political disgrace through a series of scandals and coordinated attacks from Bourbon reformers like him who accused him of favoritism toward his paisanos (fellow countrymen) and of creating a state-run monopoly of wheat trade that benefitted his family’s merchant house. His abrupt fall from power did not matter to the Crown, however, because the merchant-bureaucrat had served his purpose. While in power, the ruthlessly efficient Cossío orchestrated the collection and shipment out of the viceroyalty of tens of millions of silver pesos that sealed Britain’s military defeat in 1783. Moreover, at a time of great social discontent in Spanish America, Cossío had forced economic growth and drained the viceroyalty’s finances without provoking popular upheavals. Cossío’s virtual rule of New Spain has not entirely eluded the eye of historians, but his fall from power has served as a distraction for scholars who rush to dismiss his administrative role in the 1779–1783 period as merely an aberration. He is judged as ‘talented but erratic’ (Deans-Smith 1992, 83); inflexible, rude, and psychologically impaired to do